Chapter 32 #2
He looked at me, and his face did something that I have never been able to describe adequately, because the description requires a vocabulary of emotion that I do not possess.
He was frightened and in pain and confused, and his expression contained all of these things, but it also contained something else, something that I can only call trust, the absolute, unconditional trust of a person who believes, without reservation, that the person he is looking at will make everything better.
He trusted me. He has always trusted me.
He trusts me the way that small children trust their mothers and the way that dogs trust their masters, which is to say, completely and without conditions, and the trust is, I have always understood, not something I have earned but something I have constructed, something that exists because I have controlled every aspect of Edmund's world so thoroughly that he has never had reason to distrust me, and the trust is a function of my control, and the control is a function of my nature, and the nature is the thing that separates me from the rest of the human species and that makes the trust both possible and, in some fundamental way, fraudulent.
I held his hand. I said the words that needed to be said, the reassurances that the situation demanded, and I said them with a steadiness that I did not feel, because steadiness was what Edmund needed, and because providing what Edmund needed was the single non-strategic priority of my life, the one act that I performed not because it served a larger plan but because the alternative was unthinkable.
The doctors were there, the retired surgeon and the young man from the surgery, and they were speaking to me, explaining the nature of the injury, the fracture, the contusions, the probable concussion, and I heard their words and processed the information and filed it in the appropriate mental compartments, because the analytical mind does not stop operating simply because the emotional system is in disarray, and the coexistence of the two — the simultaneous functioning of the cold, clinical intelligence and the raw, uncontrolled fear — was a sensation that I had never experienced before and that I found, in its own way, more disturbing than the fear itself.
I saw Sebastian. He was still kneeling beside Edmund, and he was still holding Edmund's other hand, and the sight of this — of another person touching my brother, of another person's fingers interlaced with his, of another person's skin against his skin — produced in me a response that was so violent and so unexpected that I nearly lost the fragile composure I was constructing around the crisis.
The response was not jealousy, because jealousy requires a sense of possession that is threatened by a rival, and while I possess Edmund, I do not experience the threat of a rival in the way that a normal person would, because I do not experience the emotions that would make a rival threatening.
The response was closer to what I imagine a territorial animal feels when another creature encroaches on its territory: an instinctive, physical rejection of the intrusion, a revulsion that was not rational and not strategic and not subject to my control.
Sebastian was touching Edmund. Sebastian was holding Edmund's hand.
Sebastian was, through the simple physical connection of hand to hand, occupying a space that I had always occupied exclusively, and the occupation was intolerable.
"Will you release his hand, please?"
I said the words carefully, because I needed to say them carefully, because if I said them with the force that I felt, they would have emerged as a snarl, and a snarl was not consistent with the performance of composure that I was, with increasing desperation, attempting to maintain.
He released the hand. I took it. Edmund settled, his body relaxing against mine, his breathing evening out, as though my touch were a specific medicine that no other touch could replicate.
I held him, and I felt, for the first time in my adult life, the particular quality of an emotion that I will now name, not because I have developed the capacity to feel it but because I have developed the capacity to recognise its absence.
Relief. The relief of a person who has reclaimed a possession that was briefly in the custody of another.
The relief of a creature that has re-established its claim to its territory.
The relief was possessive, selfish, and utterly without generosity, and it was the strongest emotion I have ever experienced that was not directed at the strategic management of a situation, and I do not know what to do with this knowledge, so I have filed it away, in the mental compartment where I keep the things I do not understand, and I have tried, without success, to stop thinking about it.
The journey to Blackwood House was a blur.
I remember the carriage, the jolt of the wheels on the cobblestones, Edmund's weight against my shoulder, his breathing slow and regular, the laudanum that one of the doctors had administered beginning to take effect.
I remember Sebastian sitting across from me, his dark coat now smeared with the same grime that had been on his knees, his hat in his hands, his eyes on Edmund with an expression that I could not read, or rather, that I could read but did not wish to, because reading it would require acknowledging that Sebastian Aldric was capable of a form of concern for my brother that had nothing to do with strategy or manipulation or the pursuit of evidence, and acknowledging this would require me to revise my assessment of him, and revising my assessment of Sebastian Aldric was an exercise that I had performed so many times in the past five months that I was no longer certain what the assessment was.
We reached the house. I carried Edmund inside.
I laid him on the drawing room sofa, and the doctors followed, and Dorothea brought water and linen, and the familiar ritual of medical care proceeded, and through it all I sat beside Edmund and held his hand and watched his face and said nothing, because there was nothing to say that would not be a performance, and I was, for perhaps the first time in my life, incapable of performance.
The doctors finished. They withdrew to the dining room to wash their hands.
Dorothea drew the curtains and dimmed the lamps.
Edmund slept. His face, in the soft light, was the face of a child, the same auburn hair falling across his forehead, the same slightly parted lips, the same expression of utter trust that he wore in sleep as in waking, and I looked at that face and I understood, with a clarity that was almost painful in its precision, the nature of the thing I felt for him.
I did not love him. I am incapable of love.
I have understood this about myself since I was old enough to understand that the emotions other people described — the warmth, the generosity, the selflessness — were not things I experienced.
My mother taught me this, not through instruction but through demonstration: Vivienne, who performed love with the same virtuosity she performed everything else, and who, in the privacy of our shared life, was as devoid of genuine affection as a stone.
I inherited her condition. I do not mourn this inheritance; I do not celebrate it; I simply acknowledge it, in the same way that I acknowledge the colour of my eyes or the shape of my hands, as a fact of my constitution that is neither good nor bad but merely is.
But if I do not love Edmund, I possess him, and the possession is, I suspect, the closest thing my mind can produce to the experience that others call love.
I possess him the way a person possesses a limb, not with the conscious awareness of ownership but with the deep, visceral certainty that he is a part of me, that his existence is inseparable from my own, and that any harm to him is harm to a part of my body that I cannot see but can feel.
When I saw him on the cobblestones, the response was not the response of a person who loves another person.
It was the response of a body that has been injured, the sudden, overwhelming sensation of damage to tissue that is essential to survival.
The fear was not for him, not in the selfless way that love would dictate.
The fear was for me, for the part of me that he constitutes, for the irreparable loss that his death or permanent injury would represent.
This is not love. I am certain of this, as I am certain of very few things.
But it is something, and the something is powerful enough to make my hands shake and my voice break and my carefully constructed composure disintegrate on a public street in full view of the one person in the world who has the most reason to use my weakness against me.
Sebastian stepped into the drawing room.
I heard his footsteps on the carpet, the particular weight and rhythm of his gait, and I did not look up, because looking up would require me to engage with him on the level of performance and counter-performance that had characterised every previous interaction between us, and I was not capable of that engagement, not now, not with Edmund's blood drying on my dress and the residue of genuine fear still coursing through my nervous system.
He stood beside the sofa. He looked at Edmund, and then he looked at me, and then he said the thing that I had known, with a certainty that bordered on precognition, that he would say.
"He is the one thing you care about."